Rhetoric and Self-Irony in Some Modern Irish Poets

The Word Mistrusted: Rhetoric and Self-Irony in Some Modern Irish Poets Rui Carvalho Homem Universidade do Porto Abstract The bardic expectations instituted by long-standing stereotypes of 'the Irish poet7 have persistently proved a source of unease for some post- Yeatsian Irish poets, generating different perspectives on the relationship between poet and audience-as well as on the power (?) of the poetic utterance. If with a poet like Paul Muldoon an avoidance of the bardic is at al1 times made evident (as part of the (self-)deflation entailed by the parodic strategies which have become a hallmark of his writing), in the case of several other poets evasion of the voice-as- authority may prove less obvious, and not devoid of contradictions. This paper will deal with different ways of representing the perplexities of the self as holder of poetic power, drawing mostly on poems by Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney. The opening words of my title may seem strangely misplaced when applied to a reading of Irish poetry: surely a conspicuous and traditional mark of Irish writing, if not of Irish culture in general, is taken to be an inordinate trust in the word, and in the power it is supposed to wield. Countless references inay spring to our mind as actual or supposed confíation of a traditional Iris11 belief in the virtues of the word-beginning with accounts of the great respect, conjoined with fear of their literally blistering satires, due to the bards in the old Gaelic order, "second only to that of the king himself' (Leerssen 1996, 158). English reports on this early bardic prominence famously include Sidney's acknowledgment in the Defence that poets in Ireland were "held in a devout reverence", and believed to be able to inflict death by rhyming (Duncan- Jones 1994, 103, 142)' and Spenser's stern indictment of Irish bards for the political danger entailed by the "high regard and estimation" they enjoyed (Hadfield and Maley 1997,75-77). The survival of a deferential attitude to the poetic voice, understood as publicly relevant, and (in more general terms) the perplexities of the relationship between poetry and politics in Irish history have been amply traced and discussed, exempting me from the need to expand further on this issue, preliminary as it is to my argurnent. What 1 would like to posit at this point, though, is that a tradition which has 'the bardic' for one of its foundations (by which 1 simply mean, the expectation that the poetic voice will have public relevance) will exhibit a particularly close relationship between rhetoric tand poetics-the two crafts of composition which, in the Rhetoric and Self-Irony in Some Modern Irish Poets determination of the ways and the ends of discourse in Western culture, have persistently related to each other in historically variable conformations (Barthes 1970, passim). "Our traditions are histrionic and oratorical" (Donoghue 1986, 184), says Denis Donoghue of the public status of the poetic voice in Ireland-and Joyce (who hiniself decried an easy trust in Irish 'eloquence') reported that Oscar Wilde once said to Yeats, "We Irishmen . have done nothing, but we are the greatest talkers since the time of the Greeks" (Joyce 1959, 174). This entails that an awareness of audience will, in varying degrees, intervene in determining the concem of poets-for Dillon Johnston, "the poet's relation to his audience becomes a central concem which actually enters into poetry itself . This poetic relationship of the speaker and auditor within the poem is an identibng characteristic of Irish poetry" (Johnston 1985,53). Conversely, this intersection of the poetic and of a sense of public eloquence also means that the audience9sawareiiess of the poet, and of his role, will likewise acquire a certain prominence; after all, as Aristotle made clear in his Rhetoric (a craft which he memorably defined as "the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever"), ethos (the audience's acknowledgment of "the moral character of tlie speaker") is, together with logos and pathos, oiie of the "kinds of proof '- in fact, "the niost effective means of proof ': "the orator persuades by moral cliaracter when his speecli is delivered in such a inanner as to render hirn wortliy of coiifidence" (Aristotle 1959,17). The extent to which the poet in twentieth-century Ireland has effectively been acknowledged as holder of an authorized staius is, of course, a vexed question, appraisals of the relationship between writers and audiences ranging from the ecstatic to the sceptical and disillusioned. We might find an instance of the latter in Francis Stuart's reinark that "Ours is basically a peasant coiiservatisni, one that is particularly anti-art" (Stuart 1979,49). That verbal art might be an exception to such antagonism wouid seem to be the point of a testimony which significantly comes from someone with a conspicuous 'peasant' background-no less than Patrick Kavanagh, who in his later years, opposing denunciations of Irish indifference to books and writers, testified to what he saw as a virtual "hero worship for the writer" in Ireland (Kavanagh 1977,3 1). An element of contradiction and of wishful thinking may have been present in Kavanagh's remark, the vicissitudes of whose life and literary career are well known. Such a statement may have been written from that deliberately anti-Yeatsian standpoint with which Kavanagh gave a decisive conbibution to exorcising the great predecessor from too overbearing a position vis-d-vis his and the following poetic generations-the exorcism being in this case possibly directed atYeatsYs famous exaltation of the virtues of an élite audience, and his corresponding excoriations of the Catholic masses for their supposed blindness to the aesthetic. But, if Yeats aiid Kavanagh (with the remark above) would Rui Carvalho Homen probably have been at odds concerning their assessment of the ability and willingness of Irish audiences in general to acknowledge the power of the poetic word, they converge to the extent that they are poets who do not themselves question their position as wielders of aesthetically empowered language. As my title reveals, however, this article is to be concerned with poems in which 'the bardic', or (more broadly) the acknowledgment of the poet's authority, is questioned, or subject to irony. This purpose might promptly create the expectation that my major exemplar wouid be the arch ironist, the iconoclast major of recent Irish poetry, Paul Muldoon, he who will only for parody's sake don the bard's mantle; who so gleefully makes (mis)quotation a fundamental writerly strategy; who systematically dismantles any hierarchies of meaning in the networks of allusions and intertexts which his poems amount to. But Muldoon's writing might, in fact, prove an inadequate object for a study of how the poetic word can come to be 'mistrusted', for the rather obvious reason tliat the 'trust' which, conceptually, this would othenvise imply (in the sense 1 have been associating with 'the bardic') is never really a possibility with Muldoon-and this despite the way he rather surprisingly carne to the rescue of the idea of 'the author' in his 1998 F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture: "Let the theorists get over themselves. Let Barthes claim that there is no 'father- author'. Let Derrida proclaim against 'phallologocentrism'. Let them try to get round the ungetroundable fact that the poet is the first person to read or, more importantly, to be read by, the poem" (Muidoon 1998,120). The poems 1 will be considering come from the work of poets who do not necessarily and wholesalely impugn 'the bardic', but may rather-for various reasons-feel the need, at certain points in their writing, to deflate the position fiom which they write. My point will also be that such instances of 'the word mistrusted', or denounced, are not restricted to lines of tradition whose historical, political and aesthetic orientation might bring them closer to a bardic or an anti-bardic understanding of the poet's role; but are rather to be found in the work of poets variously located in the contemporary Irish literary scene-my exemplars being, in this case, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney. This choice also entails that a silent part of my argument will be to put in evidence the limitations for assessing the way poets relate to their craft and their audiences, as in so much else, of the dividing lines which have often been traced within the Irish poetic production of the past few decades-lines dividing (say) the 'Northern' Heaney and Mahon from a Kinsella very much opposed to the recognition of specific 'Northern Voices' (to borrow from Terence Brown's well-lmown title-Brown 1975); the always increasingly popular and cosmopolitan, but in many respects poetically 'conventional' Heaney, fiom the isolated and increasingly 'experimental' Kinsella; the 'atavistic' and (culturally) 'Catholic' Heaney from the sceptical rationalist and lapsed Protestant Mahon. Rhetoric and Self-Irony in Some Modern Irish Poets In the case of Thomas Kinsella, the tendency to ironise the poetic self, exposed at the point of yielding to the temptation of a facile eloquence, or to some other form of poetic or intellectual hubris, develops parallel to the process (initiated in the early 1970s) by which this poet gradually turned away from a poetic of lyrical elegance which, between the late fifties and the late sixties, had earned him a significant readershi~vena degree of popularity-and initiated an exigent poetic of spareness and 'difficulty' which, together with an inward-turning scope of reference, gave him the partly deserved reputation of an arcane 'poets' poet', privately publishing his new work in ever slimmer volurnes, years before it comes to the hands of a major publisher, and entertaining an Olyrnpic indifference to the rituals of public celebration.

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